Art I'm Looking at: Alice Neel at the De Young

Hubert and Rita (1954)

With an open mind and largely ignorant about the career and work of Alice Neel, I visited the De Young Museum yesterday to see the Alice Neel retrospective. 

David Bourdon and Gregory Battcock (1970)

What struck me most forcefully was how comfortable she appears to have been with work that appears unfinished. I was reminded of some of the paintings of Edvard Munch, which likewise feature bold, unmodified brushstrokes and areas of unpainted canvas. I was also reminded of Gilbert Stuart, who is probably best known for his portraits of George Washington. I've read that Stuart loved to paint faces but found painting backgrounds and clothing tedious. As a result, he sometimes left portraits unfinished.

Richard in the Era
of the Corporation (1978-1979)

I wonder if Neel felt the same way? I doubt it. That's not the impression I got from looking at her riveting portraits. I felt rather that, having so skillfully captured the essence of her sitter, she may have felt the rest was simply superfluous. The paintings suggest not laziness but an uncanny ability to capture a look, a gesture, or a posture, that says everything that needs to be said. The palpable presence of the sitter in these paintings is unsettling because it so strongly contrasts with the economy of the brushwork, particularly in the later paintings. The paintings, as I've said, often look unfinished. They sometimes look cartoonish (an effect heightened by the creamy whites and pastel hues she sometimes uses that reminded me of Wayne Thiebaud confections). Some of the work is reminiscent of Van Gogh in its directness and almost naive use of paint. Some reminded me of David Hockney—a painter I don't much care for because his simplicity of style too often suggests vapidity to me rather than  anything substantial, in sharp contrast with the impression I get from Neel. Despite these characteristics, the sitter is always there in Neel's portraits. These paintings seem to be alive. 

Cindy Nemser and Chuck (1975)

Seeing the Alice Neel show at the De Young Museum was a very worthwhile way to spend a few hours. Recommended. The show closes on July 10. 

Pregnant Woman (1971)

Art I'm Looking At: The Cult of the Machine at the De Young

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930
Museum of modern Art, New York

The Cult of the Machine, now on view at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, although promoted as a look at Precisionism in general (and it is that), is a veritable Charles Sheeler retrospective. It includes some of his most important works—photographs, paintings, and drawings. It was a pleasure to see in person so many Sheelers I've long admired in reproduction, particularly the paintings he made from some of his well known photographs of Ford's River Rouge plant, and his Upper Deck (1929) and Rolling Power (1939)*.

Installation view:
Shadows cast by Shaker furniture

There is less familiar work here, too—by Sheeler, by other familiar names, and by names new to me. Besides paintings, photographs, and objects of design from the period during which the Precisionist style flourished in the United States (roughly 1915 to 1945), there is a display of Shaker-designed household items that echo in their simplicity the stylized geometries of Precisionism. The venue is also showing the brief 1921 film Sheeler made with Paul Strand, Manhatta, that looks at a day in Manhattan, inspired by Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and a looping clip from Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). The Shaker items are artfully backlit, their shadows projected onto a screen. When viewed from behind, the shadows look like one of Sheeler's cityscapes.

Strand is represented by several well-known images such as Wall Street (1915) and The Court (1924). Several of Sheeler's photographs of the Doylestown Quaker meeting house are here, as are painted and drawn versions of views he photographed there, allowing side-by-side comparisons. There are a couple of good Paul Outerbridge photos and work from photographers less familiar, such as Anton Bruehl. His Untitled, a 1929 shot of part of a Cadillac engine is striking. Some of the photographs of my grandfather, Warren R. Laity, would have been right at home here.

Anton Bruehl, Untitled, 1929
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Warren R. Laity, Mail Plane, circa 1930
(Not in show), Private collection

Gerald Murphy, Razor, 1924
Dallas Museum of Art                               

Also striking is a 1924 painting entitled Razor by Gerald Murphy that immediately brings to mind paintings from the same period by Stuart Davis that draw on advertising imagery and bright colors for their impact, works that anticipate Pop Art. There is nothing by Davis in the show and I was surprised to see only one piece by Charles Demuth—the name, along with Sheeler's, that comes to mind most readily when thinking of Precisonism. But most of the artists associated with Precisionism are here, including Joseph Stella, George Ault, Niles Spencer, Morton Shamberg, and Edmund Lewandowski. George Ault's Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946, Smithsonian American Art Museum), a moody night scene dominated by eerily lit barns, and Lewandowski's small Furnace No. 5, are particularly attractive.

Francis Criss, Waterfront, c. 1940
Detroit Institute of Art

New to me were the painters Francis Criss, Elsie Driggs, Bumpei Usui, and Peter Blume. Criss's highly stylized Waterfront (c. 1940) reduces a waterfront industrial scene to its geometrical essence, using starkly contrasting saturated colors, a lamppost vestige of an earlier age, and a bold yellow-gold frame to heighten the effect. The frame is one of many in the show that are beautiful in their own right. Usui's 1924 New York cityscape 14th Street is a strong piece, with its cubes, cylinders, and pyramidal forms in a style reminiscent of some of the WPA frescoes of the period (and the show includes a painting by John Langley Howard, among those who contributed to the 1934 Coit Tower murals, a WPA project). There are also a couple of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe likely to seem surprisingly unlike her to most viewers. They differ markedly from the style she's best known for. One is a view of barns at Lake George. Another is a New York cityscape done from an elevated perspective—from the window of a high-rise apartment she shared there with husband Alfred Stieglitz.

Charles Sheeler, Upper Deck, 1929
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

Precisionism was an extension of cubism in its attention to the underlying geometry of things, in its interest in architectonic form, an extension of Futurism in its obsession with the modern and with machinery, but I'm not sure how coherent it was—if it was recognized at the time as a movement at all. Perhaps underscoring that is the fact that "precisionism" was only one of several contemporary terms used to describe the style. The painters were sometimes known as "the immaculates" or they were referred to as "modern classicists." "Precisionism" is the name that has stuck. Names aside, the work on display is quintessentially of its time.

Bumpei Usui, 14th Street, 1924
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

"Precisionism" was a label given to the American expression of anxieties common between the world wars in rapidly industrializing societies globally. The paintings and photographs of the period reflect a fascination with machinery, with scale, with industrial might, but they also betray a deep, veiled fear. The clean lines, the simplified forms, and the tendency to eliminate human beings from angular cityscapes all suggest a need to slow things down, to examine reality in an artificial, controlled way, to tame things before they spin out of control. As the Cult of the Machine wall texts point out, these anxieties are familiar today, with technology rapidly outpacing our ability to adjust to it. To express the angst caused by forward leaps of technology, artists of the early twentieth century turned to depicting the physical manifestations of rapid change—to depicting bridges, dams, turbines, factories, propellers, ocean liners—large, tangible objects that overwhelm, things built not on a human scale. Artists of the early twenty-first century perhaps have a right to feel even more overwhelmed and anxious, handicapped as they are by the seemingly insubstantial nature of the technology that today drives so much change. Our technological marvels do not have an oppressive physical presence. They are not built on a grand scale. They are miniaturized and hidden behind sleek, portable steel and glass packages, hidden inside phones and tablets. They are barely visible. There is nothing to see.

The Cult of the Machine is on view at the De Young Museum (50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, San Francisco, CA 94118) through August 12, 2018.

*It's worth noting that, in addition to the River Rouge pieces, both Upper Deck and Rolling Power were originally done as photographs (the Upper Deck photo is in the De Young show). There are many other examples of Sheeler working in a highly realistic style from photographs. I'm not aware of Sheeler being considered anticipatory to Photorealism, but surely he was, even if he usually took stylistic liberties a strict photorealist might not have.

Charles Sheeler, Rolling Power (1939)
Smith College Museum of Art

Art I'm Looking At: Stuart Davis at the De Young, San Francisco

Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, installation view

I've been aware of Stuart Davis since I was a teenager. He's always been among the 20th century American artists I've enjoyed most, along with other early American modernists such as Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles DeMuth, and Charles Sheeler, but, having just seen the Stuart Davis show now on at the De Young Museum, in San Francisco (Stuart Davis: In Full Swing), I realize that I knew little about Davis the man, that I've never seen much of his early work, and that I've never seen large groups of related canvases by him together in one room.

Stuart Davis, Odol (1924)
Museum of Modern Art, New York   

Walking into the exhibition, one thing struck me immediately: the galleries were largely empty. The contrast with the Matisse/Diebenkorn show at SF MoMA was startling (it's been hard to walk in the Matisse/Diebenkorn galleries at times for all the people). Is Davis so obscure? Perhaps the high attendance at the SF MoMA show just reflects the ongoing power of early modern European artists to draw crowds. I imagine the Impressionists, for example, remain the single most popular group of artists among the general population and that most people attending the SF MoMa show go to see Matisse rather than Diebenkorn. There's a certain irony there. Davis was among the important American artists struggling for recognition in the 1920s and 1930s when US collectors and museums were still very much focused on European art, while American art—particularly modern American art—was viewed with some skepticism.

Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike (1921)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Having never seen much of Davis's early work, I was unaware of his heavy quotation of advertising imagery. His well known later work, with its frequent use of text, is certainly suggestive of commercial signage, but early pieces in the De Young show are much more direct in their use of this kind of imagery. Odol (1924), for example, anticipates Pop Art's direct appropriation of product advertising by at least 20 years. In Lucky Strike (1921), Davis has, in effect, painted a collage of scraps of cigarette packaging. At this stage, the painter had already learned a great deal from Cubism, but his wholesale incorporation of advertising imagery into his paintings went well beyond the occasional, fragmentary quotations in the work of Braque, Picasso, and Juan Gris.

Stuart Davis, Place Pasdeloup  (1928)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Davis spent a year in Paris, in 1928–1929. The look of his paintings suddenly changed. Oddly, the influence of Cubism seems less here in the city that gave birth to Cubism than in his earlier work. Davis's Paris scenes are blocked out in flat planes of color overlaid with simple black outlines that depict cafés, storefronts, street lamps, and architectural details—although details, in general, are comparatively few. The work is simple, highly stylized. These paintings suggest travel posters or illustrations in picture books for children. The work of Raoul Dufy comes to mind. The De Young show includes several examples from this period, among them the pictured Place Pasdeloup (1928).

Stuart Davis, New York Mural (1932)
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach

Also of interest among the early pieces are the "Eggbeater" paintings (not shown here), these among works first championed by Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery. Having recently read Lindsay Pollock's biography of Halpert (The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market), it was fun to see the actual paintings. There is a striking 1932 mural of New York as well, which, according to the wall label, was made in response to an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art to produce mural designs about life in America after WWI. Davis's design includes many coded political references (Alfred Smith's brown derby and bow tie, a banana referring to the 1928 Smith campaign's use of the song "Yes, We Have no Bananas," and a champagne glass turned on its side (upper left) referring to the candidate's support for the repeal of Prohibition, among others).

Three compositionally related works

The show would have been worth seeing just for these early works, but there is a good selection of later, more familiar pieces, including several "sets" of compositionally related works mounted side by side that illustrate the way Davis repeatedly drew on his own canvases to create variations in the manner of a musician improvising variations on a theme. Davis was a jazz enthusiast and thought of his working process as being akin to jazz performance.

Throughout the show, and particularly in the later sections, I was struck by how strongly Davis's canvases suggest collage; most are very easily imagined as pasted paper cutouts. Some of the busiest pieces, such as The Mellow Pad (1945-1951) are notable also for the way Davis covers the entire canvas with color and form in a way that flattens and de-centralizes. He creates a dynamic overall pattern with almost no part of the image more important than any other. Here Davis would seem to have anticipated Jackson Pollock's drip paintings by at least a couple of years in his use of space if not in technique. Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, through August 6, 2017 at the De Young, offers much to see and much to think about.

Stuart Davis, The Mellow Pad (1945-1951)
The Brooklyn Museum

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Art I'm Looking At: Diebenkorn Around the Bay Area (July 5, 2015)

We're privileged right now to have two shows of rarely seen work by Richard Diebenkorn on view simultaneously in the Bay Area, a show of prints at the De Young in San Francisco and a show of small-scale drawings, collages, and watercolors at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in the town of Sonoma, a venue that has only recently come to my attention--and that accidentally: I happened to come across a reference to the Sonoma show in one of three books published by Kelly's Cove Press in conjunction with the exhibition, which is subtitled "The Intimate Diebenkorn."

In keeping with that subtitle, the Sonoma show presents a selection of smaller works, the largest being no more than about 24 x 36 inches (most considerably smaller) in various media. None of the images was included in the large show of Diebenkorn's work in the summer and autumn of 2013 at the De Young Museum (Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years). Some Bay Area viewers may have seen the bulk of the Sonoma show at the College of Marin (September-November 2013) or San José State University (March-May 2014), but the selection of works now at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art has been augmented by about 12 pieces not included on earlier stops. The show next travels to the University of Montana (September-December 2015).

The De Young show of Diebenkorn prints highlights the museum's "latest significant acquisition of [Diebenkorn's] prints, made possible by the Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major Accessions and the generosity of Phyllis Diebenkorn," the artist's late widow--to use the words of the introductory gallery panel. I believe the De Young Museum now has the largest collection of Diebenkorn's prints in the world aside from the collection of the Diebenkorn Foundation, from which the traveling show now in Sonoma has been assembled.

The Sonoma show provides an intimate overview of the various styles in which Diebenkorn worked. There is a good selection of representational work including still life subjects, nudes, and landscapes as well as abstract work, both in the fluid, organic style of the Berkeley and earlier periods and the more rarified, highly linear style best known from the large paintings of the later, Ocean Park period.

The works are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which allows a comparison of similar types of work from different periods, although it somewhat obscures Diebenkorn's journey from abstraction into figurative work and still life and then back to abstraction--part of what makes looking at the whole of his artistic career fascinating. Despite the diversity of subject matter, Diebenkorn was always concerned with formal compositional problems. An interior view of a posed model or a landscape was for Diebenkorn always as much about dividing up space on a flat plane as any abstraction was. The works as shown demonstrate both the breadth of his subjects and the compositional concerns that unite his work. The 1962 figure drawing in ballpoint pen shown here (above) is an excellent example--a highly economically rendered pair of nude figures but, at the same time, a composition consisting in large part of blank rectangular or squarish areas of paper separated by thin lines. The legs of the male figure at the left side of the page are particularly ambiguous. The 1958 untitled oil landscape on paper shown below likewise blurs the line between the abstract and the descriptive.

The Sonoma venue is divided into four areas: the main exhibition space, a permanent art library off to one side, a space at the front of the building where visitors are offered a place to play with paper and drawing tools if inspiration has hit them, and a darkened area behind a wall at the rear, where two videos about Diebenkorn run in a loop. One of these was made at the time of a major retrospective of the artist's work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 1977. The other shows Diebenkorn at work at Crown Point Press, in Oakland, collaborating with master printers Marcia Bartholme and Hidekatsu Takada, in 1986, photographed by Kathan Brown, the founding director of Crown Point Press. The former is short (22 minutes) and interesting mainly because it shows Diebenkorn politely, somewhat shyly interacting with an adoring public at the opening reception for the Los Angeles exhibit. The latter video (35 minutes) is of greater interest and well worth the time it takes to watch. It offers a rare look at the artist in the studio, showing him proofing prints, working on copper plates, consulting with the printers about changes, and finally coming to decisions about finished versions of a number of pieces (one of which he ultimately decides to abandon after much frustration).

Diebenkorn's work process was interactive, restless, and experimental--involving interaction between the artist and his materials. Each new piece was a kind of conversation with the medium: an idea proposed, considered, approved of or rejected--the artist always listening and responding to the voice of the evolving work--the cycle beginning again, repeating until an equilibrium was achieved. It's a process especially well suited to collage, so it's not surprising that collage enters into many of the smaller works on display in Sonoma. Some of the drawings are on joined pieces of paper. One small abstract work from 1992, the year before his death (shown here), consists of pieces of what appears to be a drawing cut up and arranged on a second blank sheet (coincidentally, highly reminiscent of some of the work of Basque artist Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002)). The Crown Point Press video shows Diebenkorn cutting up proofs and pasting them together to rework a composition--essentially designing a print by collage.

The De Young Exhibit focuses on Diebenkorn as a printmaker. He seems to have been interested in printmaking of various types throughout his long career, and many of the last works he made--when ill health had made it impossible to tackle the large canvases he favored as a younger man--were prints. Most were etchings and drypoints, but the De Young show includes a fair number of lithographs and you get a sense looking at the early examples that he was testing the limits of what appears to have been a new medium for him at the time. Some of these early lithographs are essentially line  drawings in crayon, others look like puddled ink drawings. Later color lithographs from the 1980s are more mature, looking very much like Diebenkorn the painter. Again, the subject matter in the De Young exhibit is diverse, including figure studies, landscapes, still life subjects, and abstraction. Nearly all the pieces exude something essentially Diebenkorn despite that diversity.

The show at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (one half block from Sonoma’s historic Town Plaza: 551 Broadway, Sonoma CA 95476, (707) 939-7862) runs through August 23, 2015. The show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco (Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr., San Francisco, CA 94118, (415) 750-3600) closes October 4, 2015.

Art I'm Looking At: Current Exhibitions at the De Young, San Francisco

I visited the De Young Museum in San Francisco again recently and took in most of the current exhibits. There was a lot to see. For starters, the museum is now showing pieces from a very fine collection of Native American art donated by the Thomas W. Weisel family--Lines on the Horizon: Native American Art from the Weisel Family Collection (to give the show its full name), on view through January 4, 2015.

Most of the pieces are the work of southwestern tribes. Notable are a group of very early Mimbres earthenware vessels decorated with pigment (above) and a large number of Navajo weavings, including several very fine early "chief's blankets," but there are a few choice Northwest Coast pieces too, including a striking Tsimshian mask with shell inlay (left; circa 1800-1850), and a small group of plains "ledger drawings." These last are simple, rather poignant drawings made on ruled ledger paper of the kind distributed to reservation schools by the US government--evidence of traditional activities (drawing) surviving during the period of forced assimilation. This exhibit alone is well worth a visit to the museum.

Modernism from the National Gallery of Art: The Robert & Jayne Meyerhoff Collection (through October 12, 2014), seemed poorly organized. It would have been easy enough to present these works simply as highlights of the Meyerhoff collation, but the introductory text in the galleries sets up expectations that go unfulfilled. The text suggests the show will pose and attempt to answer questions about the motivating forces behind postwar American art without really doing that. The arrangement of the works in the galleries seems fairly arbitrary. A chronological approach might have been more effective if the intent was to show the range of styles American artists have explored in the last seven decades (the works range from the late 1940s through the present, more or less, with many familiar names represented). That said, I thought the exhibition was worth seeing. The highlight was Barnet Newman's 16-panel series The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani presented in a chapel-like setting, as originally intended. Pictured here is Third Station (1960). Each of the paintings repeats a basic composition with variations. Newman called the series (painted over about 8 years--between 1958 and 1966) a "complete statement of a single subject," according to the gallery text, and that abstract meaning would seem to fit the works better than the religious idea that was their original armature.

Perhaps most interesting, however, was a show of Walasse Ting's 1¢ Life, a large book of Ting's poetry. I had never heard of Ting or his book, but I very much enjoyed seeing this collaborative creation, which, published in 1964, is 50 years old this year. A remarkable group of 28 artists worked with Ting to illustrate with lithographs a collection of 61 of his ungrammatical, chaotic, evocative, sometimes comical poems--artists including familiar names like Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Joan Mitchell, James Rosenquist, Sam Francis, Tom Wesselman, Pierre Alechinsky, Jim Dine, Mel Ramos, and Robert Indiana, as well as some names less familiar to me. A lot of fun on many levels, the book is notable for Ting's exuberant poetry (some of it difficult to read on pages displayed upright well below eye level), for the lithographs, and for its very conception--as an interesting example of bookmaking (although the volume on display is unbound; 1¢ Life appears to have been conceived as a portfolio). It functions as a snapshot of lithography of the period, especially interesting for the inclusion of several artists not much accustomed to the medium. It's unclear to me whether Ting's odd use of language was a direct result of linguistic weaknesses or if he knew better and deliberately chose a pidgin-like idiom that evokes Hollywood caricatures of Chinese, non-native speakers of English. To give just one example, a verse from his poem "Go Back Infant" (illustrated by Karel Appel) reads (all in caps):

Syphilis from mother life from father
Electric chair and gas chamber from government
Can you fly
You female grow big breasts mangoes
Garbage flower
Marry millionaires
Happy
Mink coat better than skin skin better than heart
Heart better than soul
Hair grease best
Woman not spring? Spring not perfume? Perfume not happiness?
Where happiness
In afternoon tea?
In beauty salon?
In television set?
Go back infant
Go back Angel

Strange, but often compelling language typifies the writing. The exhibition of Walasse Ting's 1¢ Life is showing through September 7, 2014.

Art I'm Looking At: Richard Diebenkorn at the De Young Museum in San Francisco (July 17, 2013)

After seeing the "Impressionists on the Water" show at the Legion of Honor, I went to see the Diebenkorn show now on at the DeYoung Museum—Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years (1953-1966).

Diebenkorn has long been among my favorite abstract painters. There's something about his work that resonates with me, but I realize I knew very little about his life or about the long arc of his career before seeing this show, which helped to educate me a little. For example, I was almost completely unaware of the figurative work he did during the middle of the period covered here. Judging from the paintings included, Diebenkorn focused briefly on figurative subjects mostly between about 1956 and 1958. These works are sandwiched between earlier, purely abstract works characterized by flat patches of color (often in pinks, ochre, and other fleshy tones) and later abstract work with a greater emphasis on line. It's the earlier abstract work (roughly between 1953 to 1955) that I enjoy most. It was a real pleasure to stand in a large room surrounded by about 15 large works from the early period. Berkeley No. 3 (1953, below) is typical.

Line is not absent as an element in these earlier paintings and some of them contain abstracted letters or appear to contain fragments of text, but the emphasis is on color, and most of the colored areas in the works are loosely defined, with blurry or ragged edges. Diebenkorn is said to have been strongly influenced by the Abstract Impressionists at this stage (especially by Willem de Koonig), and I've read comments suggesting he should himself be considered an Abstract Expressionist, but these paintings seem too quiet, too contemplative to be called Abstract Expressionist. They have none of the anger or nervousness I associate with that movement. There is no deliberate, explosive splattering of paint here, no frantic, nervous brushwork. Diebenkorn instead seems to have left us with records of inner conversations about color and form. I'm not the first to note that many of the works look like landscapes. There is very often a suggested horizon line. Although these may not have been intended as actual horizons, they serve to give the paintings a solidity despite the open washes of color. There is something very reminiscent of Cezanne in these paintings. Others in the show that incorporate decorative motifs clearly show an interest in Matisse. There are even a couple of large cut-out collages in the show that borrow technique as well as style from Matisse.

The figurative paintings seem less successful to me. It may simply be a matter of taste, but they don't speak to me the way the abstract paintings do. That said, it was interesting to see Diebenkorn's foray into an area of painting that was quite unfashionable at the time—a time when American abstraction was at the center of the Western art world. Perhaps it was conscious rebellion. Perhaps it felt too easy to paint the abstractions. I don't mean to suggest that abstraction is in any way easier than figurative art. In fact, I believe quite the contrary. The figurative artist at least has his subject in front of him as a point of reference. Painting in the abstract requires the subject itself to be conjured up out of thin air, although much that passes for abstract art is, in fact, referential. I mean simply that I think artists sometimes become suspicious of their own motives and the value of their work when they produce a great deal quickly, and Diebenkorn was certainly prolific during his early years in Berkeley. Perhaps he felt the need to step away from what he was doing so successfully at the time. It was during his first couple of years in Berkeley that he appears to have quite suddenly attracted a great deal of attention from the media. Coffee (1959) is typical of the figurative paintings. It's among those I like best, but the figurative work seems somehow less authentic, less the result of committed interest, the color less inspired—certainly less sensual. Still, it was very useful to see the many works from this period included in the show.    

After the flirtation with making large figurative paintings, the return to abstraction is marked by a somewhat more rigid, geometrical quality. Line becomes a much more central element. The paintings are almost cartographic. They look like aerial photographs of agricultural land broken up by the occasional line of trees along a river. They are less fluid than the earlier work. The last third of the show is mostly paintings in this more linear style, but interspersed throughout the show are figure drawings that Diebenkorn continued to make regardless of where his painting was going. Eventually the growing emphasis on line blossomed into the even more linear, straight-edged paintings with Ocean Park titles such as the one pictured here, which is in the De Young's permanent collection--Ocean Park 119 (1979).

I've never before seen so many of Diebenkorn's works collected together. It's not often that I immediately want to go back again to see a show I've just walked through, but I hope to visit the Diebenkorn show once more before it leaves the DeYoung. Well worth a visit—or two. There is much to see here. The show runs through September 29.

Found art: Museum Shadows (November 24, 2012)

The black feet of a statue and its shadow in the De Young Museum, in San Francisco, made this abstract composition. Found art.

For more found art, see my blog Serendipitous Art.

Art I'm Looking At: Wire Sculptures by Ruth Asawa at the De Young (June 21, 2012)

The day before yesterday I spent most of the day in San Francisco. After taking a walk on Ocean Beach and having a grotesque and virtually inedible bowl of oatmeal at a little café down by the water (the coffee was fine; the oatmeal looked and tasted like it had been made the week before and then freshly microwaved--don't people know what good oatmeal should taste like?), I drove over to see the De Young Museum for the first time in a year or so. I mostly saw the regular collection, choosing not to spend the extra money to see the JeanPaul Gaulthier exhibit now going on. It was funny (and a pleasure), though, to see that many people in the museum seemed to be rather better dressed than usual.

There is a good Sargent in the De Young, an 1884 portrait of Caroline de Bassano, Marquise d'Espeuilles. Sargent depicts fabrics with a skill that's breathtaking. A few seemingly random strokes conjure up textures so real that you can almost hear the cloth rustle as the subject moves ever so slightly (the figure is static yet animated). The strokes of paint in the dress are abstract and painterly, yet, if you step back a little, they suddenly lose their substance and become part of an ethereal whole. The dress worn by this Caroline de Bassano is an excellent example of Sargent's ability to paint fabrics that seem alive. My photograph of the painting here can't do it justice.

Painting faces, Sargent captures the flesh but also the personality. I have no doubt that Caroline de Bassano looked just as Sargent has painted her (not very flatteringly--with her very large eyes, receding chin, and thin upper lip)--but he's also captured her personality--or so it seems. She looks ambitious and superficially confident, but somehow extremely insecure at the same time. She seems deeply in need of something. A pleasure to see this painting again.

Most interesting, however, was a set of sculptures by Ruth Asawa tucked away in a back corner. I would have missed them entirely if I hadn't decided to climb the tower at the museum. "Climb" is a misnomer. I was disappointed to find there is no access by steps (although, in the event of a fire, there must be, during normal conditions the stairway is reserved for staff use, as this area houses administrative offices). Reluctantly, I went up by elevator. The tower gives a surprisingly good view of the surroundings. It's well worth the detour--even without the sculptures in the elevator hall. These are wire constructions that cast shadows as interesting as the sculptures themselves. I must confess that I enjoyed the shadows as much or more than the wire pieces--although it goes without saying, perhaps, that the two are inseparable. In any case, the sculptures are well worth seeking out.

Found Art: Shadows at the De Young (January 11, 2011)

Another photo from the backlog in my iPhone. These were overlapping shadows around a pedestal at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, created by multiple spotlights illuminating a sculpture. Found art.

For more found art, see my blog Serendipitous Art.